Overview

• Zuckerberg said the core group needs roughly 50 to 100 researchers, describing “seats on the boat” as precious and the work as a group science project.
• He emphasized a very flat structure with no top‑down research deadlines, arguing fixed timelines would not help frontier scientists.
• Zuckerberg placed himself in the lab alongside the chief scientist and researchers to stay hands‑on with hiring and operations.
• Fortune confirmed early churn with one core researcher, Ethan Knight, leaving after less than a month, as the AI division restructures into four teams and pauses hiring per prior reporting.
• Reporting indicates Meta poured around $14–15 billion into Scale AI and offered multimillion‑dollar pay and extensive GPU resources to recruit talent, with Scale founder Alexandr Wang taking a leading role in the effort.